Skip to content
Work with me

Why Most B2B Founders Stall Before $1M ARR (And How to Fix It)

Guillaume Duvaux
Guillaume Duvaux |

The Hardest Lesson I Learned as a Founder

In my first startup, I spent months obsessing over the product—adding features, tweaking the UI, refining performance. I assumed that once the product was great and full of features, customers would buy.

They didn’t.

Instead, I watched as startups with worse products—slower, buggier, even objectively inferior—won customers and grew while we struggled. That was my wake-up call: startups don’t fail because of bad products. They fail because they don’t have a proven, repeatable and predictable go-to-market strategy.

Over the last decade, I’ve worked with 20+ early-stage founders, and the pattern is always the same. The startups that get stuck before $1M ARR aren’t missing a killer feature. They’re missing a scientific approach to targeting, acquiring and closing customers.

The problem always boils down to two critical mistakes.

The Two Failure Points That Kill Startups Before $1M ARR

1. No Structured Process to Validate PMF

Many founders think they have product-market fit when a few customers start using their product. That’s wrong.

Real PMF means you can generate demand and close deals predictably.

So why do most startups get stuck?

  • They skip deep customer discovery. They build solutions before deeply understanding the highest-urgency problems customers need solved right now.

  • They go too broad with ICP. Instead of focusing on a niche with high pain and urgency, they try to sell to “everyone.” The result? Weak messaging that resonates with no one.

  • They test sales in an unstructured way. They send 50 cold emails, get mixed responses, and assume outbound doesn’t work—when the real issue is unclear positioning or poor messaging.

Here’s what happens next: they either burn through energy and cash too fast or get stuck with a trickle of random customers that don’t compound into a real business.

How to Fix It: A Scientific Approach to Finding PMF

PMF isn’t something you “feel.” It’s something you prove with data.

Your startup should be able to:

  • Generate consistent inbound or outbound interest without relying on luck

  • Close deals through a repeatable sales process

  • Retain and expand customers because they can’t live without your solution

To get there, treat PMF validation as a structured experiment, not guesswork.

  1. Find a niche with high pain and urgency. If you can’t find a segment where prospects say, “I need this now,” you’re in trouble.

  2. Refine your messaging until it lands. Your first few sales calls should tell you if your pitch works—if not, iterate until you find a message that gets immediate buy-in.

  3. Track every sales interaction like an experiment. Which ICPs are responding? Which objections come up repeatedly? If you aren’t adjusting based on real sales data, you’re flying blind.

When done right, this process can cut months off your PMF timeline and give you clarity on what’s actually working.

But that’s only half the battle.

2. No Repeatable Sales & Marketing Engine

Even when a startup finds early PMF, most fail to turn that into scalable growth.

Why? Because early traction is not the same as having a repeatable sales process.

Common mistakes:

  • Hiring a salesperson too early. If you don’t have a playbook yet, no salesperson will magically fix your sales problems.

  • Relying on referrals or inbound leads. If you can’t generate demand proactively, you don’t control your growth—you have a waiting game.

  • Running inconsistent sales processes. If every deal follows a different process, you’ll never improve conversion rates or scale predictably.

At this stage, revenue is unpredictable. Some months are great, others are dead. Every deal feels like a coin flip.

How to Fix It: Build a Scalable Revenue Engine

To get past $1M ARR, you need a predictable lead generation and sales process.

Here’s what that means in practice:

  1. Lead generation must be systematic. Whether it’s outbound, inbound, partnerships, or PLG—there must be a consistent flow of qualified prospects entering your pipeline.

  2. Sales must be structured. Every deal should go through a defined process: qualification → discovery → value alignment → closing. No improvisation.

  3. You need a sales playbook. If a new founder or salesperson joined tomorrow, they should be able to follow a repeatable sales motion that already works.

Without these, your growth will always be chaotic and unreliable.

How to Implement This in Your Startup

I’ve helped founders take these principles and turn them into fast, scalable revenue machines.

Here’s what happens when you implement them properly:
- You validate PMF in weeks, not months
- You build a repeatable pipeline instead of relying on luck
- Your sales cycles shorten, your deal sizes grow, and you close deals with confidence
- You move from founder-led sales to a scalable, repeatable revenue model

That’s how you go from struggling for every sale to hitting $1M ARR as fast as possible.

Takeaway: Your Next Step

Before your next sales call, take 10 minutes to review your pitch. Ask yourself:

  • Is my messaging crystal clear for this prospect, or does it sound like a generic pitch?

  • Am I targeting a niche with a painful, urgent problem?

  • Can I explain the value of my product in one sentence for this prospect?

If not, your messaging and positioning likely need work. Fix this before anything else.

Talk soon,

Guillaume.

Share this post

Keep reading